Working from his new home office in Los Angeles, Bill Connolly starts his days early in order to connect with his team in New York. As the Director of Content Marketing for visual marketing platform Olapic, Bill leads the global content development strategy for the company with the goal of acquiring and nurturing sales leads. He’s telling Olapic’s story in order to build brand awareness and deliver value to their audiences with killer content.
Olapic (pronounced Oh-luh-pic) is a pretty cool company
Olapic is all about the power of visual marketing … so they are cool AND incredibly relevant for brands looking to connect more deeply with their audiences. On the scene for about five years, Olapic helps companies maximize the value of consumer-generated content by utilizing an algorithm that aggregates images from various online networks. These images are then rated and served up for marketing use.
Bill articulates this process with a great example:
“Let’s say a consumer goes out and buys a new watch, then takes a photo of this awesome watch and posts it out on Instagram. Olapic locates and rates that image, sharing it back with the marketing team for use in their branding efforts. In this way, the company is able to build a deeper relationship with the consumer and helps to curate the brand experience for their audiences through the eyes of the consumer.”
Clearly, this is a trend that’s here to stay, which is evidenced in Olapic’s rapid global growth that includes headquarters in New York and presence in Los Angeles, London and Argentina.
Behind the marketing scenes at Olapic
In describing Olapic’s marketing team, Bill shares his excitement in working with such an incredibly talented and international group. There are 10 people on the team who hold product marketing, partner marketing, creative and content marketing roles. But he’s quick to point out that it’s extremely collaborative, which is why Olapic is in the process of rolling out a project management solution for appropriate prioritization and efficiency.
As the company’s content guru, Bill takes advantage of marketing automation via Marketo, which they have integrated with Salesforce. Both tools enable the company to gain key insights into their audiences and to create nurturing streams that help drive leads further into the funnel. And this is all fueled by, and integrated with, a WordPress website that has grown with the company.
The team offers a deep breadth of content on their website with various resources that are highlighted on optimized landing pages that also offer up related resources to continually move site visitors along in the marketing and sales process.
Globalization has its challenges … and major rewards.
As you can imagine, the world is Bill’s oyster. How does a visual marketing company working with so many major brands in so many geographic locations narrow the field when it comes to content marketing?
Bill is working on identifying top-level content themes in conjunction with his counterpart in the UK in order to ensure alignment. By looking at the overarching story and associated themes, as well as the regionalization of those themes, he determines which individual content pieces should receive the greatest priority for development.
Still, with constant shifts in the digital space, as well as the flexibility required in response to the marketplace, this is no easy task. Armed with the insights from his marketing automation platform, though, Bill is confident that he’ll be able to achieve his content marketing goals and adjust his strategy along the way.
Defining “authentic marketing”
In discussing the trends that he’s most focused on, Bill is very passionate about the concept of “authentic marketing.” In the age of technology and social commerce, consumers are more informed and have more options than ever before, so how can marketers reach them on a deeper level?
“The mandate for marketers is to be more authentic and create realistic, branded experiences for their audiences,” Bill said. “And this is happening through user-generated content (UGC). For example, if you are looking at the products of a particular makeup brand, you want to see realistic photos of people like you, with your skin tone, wearing that makeup; it’s a more authentic representation of that product. And the same can be said for the travel industry with companies such as Yelp and Expedia. Users want to see the real photos of the resort, not the staged ones.”
The Marketing Technologist
Marketing technology is growing rapidly, so you have to be a technologist as well as a marketer. This makes marketing at Olapic – and marketing in general – more challenging since there are so many integrations that have made marketing far more complex. That said, we are able to do many more interesting things to activate engagement, drive marketing efforts and see what’s working, as well as what’s not.
So what can other marketers take away from Bill’s experiences?
Experiential marketing is the new black. Well, it’s not really so new but it is definitely here to stay. Social networks have ushered in an era in which user-generated content has become much more important; customers care much more about cultivated experiences.
